Sunday, March 31, 2013

An Idea Whose Time Has Gone

In 1955, the libertarian economist Milton
Friedman proposed what was, for its time, a radical idea: that schoolchildren
be given government-funded vouchers to enable them to attend private schools. As ubiquitous as
the notion of "school choice" has since become, Friedman's
suggestion didn't immediately catch on, remaining mostly confined to academia
for well over a decade. Then, in the 1970s, Lyndon Johnson-era liberals
connected with President Nixon's Office of Economic Opportunity suggested
that generous vouchers be provided to low-income students, hoping to increase
funds available for poor students and promote racial integration. But a
coalition of teachers unions and school administrators strenuously objected,
and the idea went nowhere.

It wasn't until Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980
that the modern school voucher movement took shape. Reagan's own relatively
modest voucher proposals were repeatedly rebuffed by Congress. However, his ascent unleashed a torrent
of money into conservative think tanks and advocacy groups promoting policies
that would advance the movement's agenda of weakening the government, and, by
extension, the Democratic Party.Conservative
activists like William J. Bennett, Jack Kemp, and Clint Bolick seized on
vouchers as a particularly potent example, in part because they struck at the
heart of the nation's most deeply established governmental activity—public
schooling. If conservatives could show that private schools worked better
than public ones, and that the introduction of competition improved entire
school systems, that would advance their arguments for welfare rollbacks,
Social Security privatization, and other initiatives to replace government
programs with the free market.

Based on such thinking, the John M. Olin and the Lynde and Harry
Bradley Foundations led the way in pouring millions of dollars into
institutions and activities that promoted vouchers and school choice. By 1987, the notion of vouchers had
become sufficiently commonplace that Bennett, who had become Reagan's
secretary of education, observed: "When I started talking about choice a
couple of years ago, it was still regarded as somewhat heretical. Now it
seems to be the conventional wisdom." In 1990, the Wisconsin
legislature launched the nation's first publicly financed voucher initiative
to include private schools in Milwaukee, backed by Tommy Thompson, the
reform-minded Republican governor; Annette "Polly" Williams, a
liberal African American state legislator; and the pugnacious Michael S.
Joyce, the head of the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation. The voucher idea received a further
infusion of legitimacy that same year from a hugely influential book called Politics,
Markets, & America's Schools, by the scholars John E. Chubb and Terry
M. Moe. Although the book was funded by the Olin and Bradley Foundations,
it was published by the liberal Brookings Institution, where Chubb was a
senior fellow. This affiliation suggested, misleadingly, that their argument
wasn't rooted in right-wing ideology.

Throughout the 1990s
and the early part of this decade, voucher advocates sustained the offensive,
gaining increasing support from African Americans such as Colin Powell and
the prominent civil rights activist and mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young; and
Democrats such as Robert Reich, who believed that a radical experiment like
vouchers was worth trying after the failure of more traditional reforms to
produce functional urban school systems. After a favorable state supreme court
ruling in 1998, Milwaukee's voucher experiment was expanded, from about
fifteen hundred students attending less than two dozen secular schools to
more than five thousand students spread among nearly a hundred mostly
parochial schools; this school year, roughly twenty thousand Milwaukee
students attend 122 voucher schools. In 1996, Cleveland launched a voucher
program for several thousand students, which was approved by the U.S. Supreme
Court in 2002. The Florida legislature enacted a school voucher plan in 1999,
as did Colorado in 2003, and the U.S. Congress, for Washington, D.C., in
2004. And although the No Child Left
Behind Act rankled many conservatives because it extended the federal
government's reach into a traditionally state and local realm, the Bush
administration attempted to mollify the right by including provisions that
allowed failing public schools to be reconstituted by private contractors.
By casting liberal opponents of vouchers as defenders of a miserable status
quo in America's cities, conservatives were generally successful at
portraying themselves as the genuine reformers fighting to liberate poor
minority children trapped in lousy schools.

But in recent
months, almost unnoticed by the mainstream media, the school voucher movement
has abruptly stalled. Some stalwart advocates of vouchers have either
repudiated the idea entirely or considerably tempered their enthusiasm for
it.
Exhibit A is "School Choice Isn't Enough," an article in the winter
2008 City Journal (the quarterly published by the conservative
Manhattan Institute) written by the former voucher proponent Sol Stern. Acknowledging that voucher programs for
poor children had "hit a wall," Stern concluded: "Education
reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories,
derived from the study of economic activity, that don't produce verifiable
results in the classroom." His conversion has triggered an intense
debate in conservative circles. The center-right education scholar Chester E.
Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a longtime critic
of public school bureaucracies and teachers unions, told the New York Sun
that he was sympathetic to Stern's argument. In his newly published memoirs, Finn also writes of his increasing
skepticism that "the market's invisible hand" produces improved
performance on its own. Howard Fuller, an African American who was the
superintendent of schools in Milwaukee when the voucher program was launched
there, and who received substantial support from the Bradley Foundation and
other conservative institutions over the years, has conceded, "It hasn't worked like we thought
it would in theory."

From all appearances, then, the voucher movement may not long
outlive its founder, Friedman, or its most vigorous advocate and funder,
Michael Joyce, who both died in 2006. How
did one of the conservative policy world's most cherished causes crumble so
quickly?

One simple reason
why voucher supporters have become disillusioned is that the programs haven't
delivered on their promises. School choice advocates claimed that vouchers
would have two major benefits: low-income kids rescued from dysfunctional
public schools would do better in private schools; and public schools would
improve, thanks to the injection of some healthy competition.

Let's
start with the contention that the academic performance of low-income
children would improve after they moved to private institutions. For a long time, it
was absurdly difficult to find out whether this was true in the one place
where vouchers had been tried over an extended period: Milwaukee. After that city's initial small-scale initiative
produced ambiguous, but generally unimpressive, results (and a lot of
fighting over that data), the Wisconsin legislature chose to omit testing
requirements altogether when the program was significantly expanded in 1998.
This February, however, a group of researchers led by professors Patrick J.
Wolf and John F. Witte produced the first installment of a study intended to
follow how comparable groups of students in the public and private voucher
schools perform over time. At least at
the outset, they found no statistically significant differences in the test
scores between the public and private school fourth and eighth graders for
the 2006-07 school year. For the private as well as the public school
students, the scores generally hovered around the 33rd percentile—in other
words, a typically low performance for schools with high concentrations of
poverty.

In
Cleveland, a similar but now completed study that followed the same students
over time showed dispiriting results from that city's voucher program.
Tracking the scores of students who began kindergarten in the 1997-98 school
year through their sixth-grade year in 2003-04, Indiana University researchers found no significant differences in
overall achievement, reading, or math scores between students who used
vouchers and those who stayed in public schools, after taking into account
socioeconomic differences.

What about the effect of vouchers on
public schools that were forced to compete for students with private ones? Voucher supporters believed that public
schools would improve for two reasons. First, school administrators, faced
with diminishing funds for every child that used a voucher to transfer to a
private school, would be impelled to do better. And second, because parents
would be encouraged to shop for the best place for their children, they would
become more involved in the school they chose and hold it to higher standards.

Neither
of these pressures has had a discernible impact on public school performance. In Wisconsin, this was made starkly
evident in last year's results from the National Assessment of Educational
Progress (NAEP), the federally sponsored gold standard of testing. Reading scores for black fourth- and
eighth-grade students were the lowest of any state, and the reading
achievement gap between black and white students remains the worst in the
nation. Since about 70 percent of Wisconsin's black students attend Milwaukee
public schools, any competition-induced improvements evidently haven't
amounted to much. One study, by Harvard's Caroline M. Hoxby, a voucher
advocate, purported to find test score improvements in the Milwaukee public
schools most affected by the risk of losing students to private schools; but
the gains may have been caused simply by the lowest-performing students
moving to private schools, as Hoxby herself concedes. In any case, the
Manhattan Institute's Stern points out that Hoxby's analysis, published in
2001, is outdated compared to the more comprehensive and recent NAEP results,
and calls the public school performance in Milwaukee after years of voucher
competition "depressing."

In the Cleveland public schools, fourth-grade math scores on the NAEP
test improved significantly from 2003 to 2005, though comparable gains
occurred in seven of ten other big cities without vouchers. Cleveland's fourth-grade reading test
improvements were more modest, and smaller than gains in Atlanta and New York
City—neither of which has a public voucher program.

Also
disappointing to voucher advocates has been the discovery that the innovation
of choice hasn't caused parents to become noticeably more involved in public
schools. One of the strategies that the Bradley Foundation initially used to
lay the groundwork for vouchers in Milwaukee was to create a think tank
called the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which churned out studies
trashing public schools. Last October, however, WPRI produced a report on the
Milwaukee voucher experience, titled "The Limits of Parent-Driven
Reform," that confessed: "The report you are reading did not yield
the results we hoped to find. We had expected to find a wellspring of hope
that increased parental involvement in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS)
would be the key ingredient in improving student performance." Instead, the institute found that
only 10 percent of parents had been the kind of "active consumers"
that would "exert market-based influence to the school system," and
concluded that focusing on parental choice and involvement "cannot be
seen as a substitute for substantive reforms in the hierarchy of MPS and in
the classrooms throughout Milwaukee." WPRI employed questionable
methodology to reach its conclusions, as it had often done in the past, but
this time the results undercut an initiative the institute had championed for
years.

Ultimately,
the voucher experiments confirmed what their critics had asserted all along.
The heart of the problem with our urban schools is neither the education
bureaucracies nor teachers unions, as Chubb, Moe, and many other voucher
advocates have contended, flawed though those institutions may be.

Instead,
as the sociologist James S. Coleman found in the 1960s, a student's family's
income and the collective social and economic background of his classmates
are by far the most important influences on his academic future. Not only do
lower-income students tend to score relatively poorly, children of any
background who attend high-poverty schools are far more likely to produce
worse test results than they would in schools with primarily middle-class
students. America's urban school
systems remain almost universally dysfunctional, primarily because the
country as a whole is about as segregated by race and income as at any time
since the civil rights revolution.

This
means that in the existing voucher programs, which have been confined to city
school districts, students have had only a limited choice between public
schools in low-income neighborhoods and private institutions—mostly parochial
schools—that serve almost identical populations. In 2005, a team of
reporters from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel visited all but a
handful of the private choice schools, and found that "the voucher schools feel, and look, surprisingly like schools
in the Milwaukee Public Schools district. Both ... are struggling in the same
battle to educate low-income, minority students." The Journal
Sentinel also reported that the absence of oversight from the
much-derided government bureaucracy had led to a significant waste of public
funds, and even outright fraud. At
least ten of the 125 private schools in the voucher program "appeared to
lack the ability, resources, knowledge, or will to offer children even a
mediocre education." Most of those schools were led by individuals who
had negligible experience and had no resources other than state payments.
(One notorious case was Alex's Academics of Excellence, a school started by a
convicted rapist that continued to enroll students for years after enduring
two evictions, allegations of drug use by school staff on school grounds, and
an investigation by the district attorney, before finally closing in 2004.)
The Journal Sentinel also found that many parents left their children
in bad schools long after it was clear that they were failing. Recently, national studies of NAEP
tests have confirmed that private and charter schools on average perform
little or no better than traditional public schools (and in some cases
worse), after taking into account the socioeconomic background of the
students.

Vouchers would
hardly be the first conservative policy fixation to founder on the shoals of
empirical evidence. Yet the conservative backers of, say, supply-side
economics or health savings accounts haven't traditionally allowed hard facts
to deter them. Many of the erstwhile champions of school choice are having second
thoughts not only because vouchers are a policy failure, but also because
they didn't materialize into the political game changer that right-wing
activists were hoping for.

In 1997, the conservative writer
Michael Gerson (who would go on to be George W. Bush's chief speechwriter)
took a tour of small-town Indiana when the state was considering a voucher
program. He found that its predominantly
conservative population prized its public schools (mostly because of their
proud basketball tradition) and resented the suggestion that these
institutions were failing their students. Over the years, various
proposals for vouchers in Indiana have never progressed very far. "Conservative politicians running
in this state quickly find that criticizing public education—or suggesting
that some people might want to opt out—is like spitting on the school
colors," Gerson wrote in U.S. News & World Report, noting
that in 1997, support for voucher programs was higher in the liberal
Northeast than the more conservative Midwest.

In 2000, both California and Michigan
offered referendums on voucher programs for all children in the state. The
initiatives were defeated by margins of forty-two and thirty-eight points,
respectively. Voucher supporters like to blame the defeats on well-funded
teachers unions, but the law professors James E. Ryan and Michael Heise found
that voucher supporters had outspent the opposition in Michigan, and both
sides had spent about the same amount of money in California. They concluded that the decisive
resistance to vouchers had come from suburban voters who feared that the
programs would take money away from local schools and worried about the
arrival of lower-income and minority students in their children's classrooms.
And last year, in the conservative, predominantly white state of Utah, the
Republican legislature put a November referendum for a voucher program on the
state ballot, which Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and his family supported
with about $4 million. It lost by 62 percent to 38 percent—the eighth
decisive loss for a statewide voucher ballot initiative. There have not been
any victories.

Bill
Burrow, the associate director of the Office on Competitiveness under the
first President Bush, has noted that school choice is "popular in the
national headquarters of the Republican Party but is unpopular among the
Republican rank-and-file voters who have moved away from the inner city in
part so that their children will not have to attend schools that are racially
or socioeconomically integrated." Indeed, the term "voucher"
has become so politically unattractive that in his January State of the Union
address this year, President George W. Bush concocted the euphemism
"Pell Grants for Kids" to propose a federal initiative to support
private religious schools that has no chance of passing Congress.

Finally,
conservative activists are increasingly realizing that even if they can overcome
political resistance to statewide voucher programs, they may be defeated in
the end by the courts. In 2004, Colorado's supreme court ruled that the state's voucher
law violated the state constitution's requirement that local districts retain
control over locally raised funds. In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court struck
down its statewide voucher program on the grounds that it violated a section
of the constitution requiring a free and "uniform" system of public
schools. Many other state constitutions include so-called Blaine Amendments,
which explicitly bar government aid to sectarian schools and
institutions—greatly limiting the jurisdictions in which voucher plans are
legally viable.

As
these realities have set in, the conservative movement's formidable resources
and energy have, to a large extent, shifted away from vouchers and toward the
much less controversial idea of charter schools. (Because charters are sanctioned by state
governments but allowed to operate autonomously from the public school hierarchy,
they appeal to the right's desire to sideline the bureaucracy and the
teachers unions, while posing much less of a threat to the public schools
than vouchers.) The right's
spending on educational issues is now led by the Walton Family Foundation, which
devoted about 80 percent of its education spending toward activities related
to charter schools—an allocation of some $50 million a year. The Olin
Foundation spent itself out of existence in 2005, but the Bradley Foundation
remains active, with, for example, a $3 million grant in 2007 to the Charter
School Growth Fund. For all the Sturm und Drang created by the right-wing
marketing machine, the number of students who have used publicly financed
vouchers to attend private schools over the past eighteen years amounts to no
more than the population of a medium-size suburb, and only a small fraction
of those now enrolled in charter schools.

The conservative
infatuation with vouchers did contribute to one genuine accomplishment. The
past thirty years have been a period of enormous innovation in American
education. In addition to charter schools, all kinds of strategies have taken
root: public school choice, new approaches to standards and accountability,
magnet schools, and open enrollment plans that allow low-income city kids to
attend suburban public schools and participate in various curriculum-based
experiments. To the extent that the threat of vouchers represented a
"nuclear option" that educators would do anything to avoid, the
voucher movement helped to prompt broader but less drastic reforms that offer
parents and students greater educational choices.

Along
the way, some success stories have emerged, along with the many
disappointments. But among the most promising approaches, as my Century Foundation
colleague Richard Kahlenberg recently wrote in Democracy, are
strategies that combine school choice initiatives like magnet and charter
schools with policies to integrate poor and middle-class students. Wake
County, North Carolina, for instance, introduced a policy in 2000 mandating
that no school could have more than 40 percent of its students eligible for
free or reduced-price lunches. Because this program makes use of choice and
incentives like magnet schools to integrate poor and middle-class kids, it avoids
the political hazards of compulsory busing. So far, the results have been
impressive. In 2006, 60.5 percent of low-income students in Wake County
passed the high school End of Course exams, compared to 43 percent of
low-income students in a nearby county of a comparable size.

Of
course, the inherent limit to this idea is that many urban school districts
are so uniformly poor that there are few, if any, middle-class communities
with schools that low-income kids can attend. One way to get
around this problem would be to amend the No Child Left Behind Act to give
students in failing schools the ability to attend a school outside their own
district. If voucher proponents are
truly motivated by a desire to help disadvantaged kids, and not merely an
ideological urge to weaken public institutions, they have a chance to show it
by putting their prodigious energies and money behind choice programs like
these that actually work.